Pete Naughton previews the week's best or most topical downloadable
podcasts and Internet radio stations.

The Telegraph’s new weekly podcast and internet radio column is here to provide readers with an accessible, friendly guide to the vibrant but dizzyingly crowded world of online listening. There’s an extraordinary amount to explore including archived concerts, lectures, dramas and comedies.

But to keep things simple, each week’s column contains reviews of three downloadable podcasts and one live internet radio station. If you have any listening recommendations, they will be gratefully received at pete.naughton@telegraph.co.uk.

For a full guide on how to access podcasts and internet radio, visit telegraph.co.uk/tvandradio

Magnatune Bach Podcast Magnatune is a pioneering Californian record label that strives to treat both musicians and customers fairly. As part of its promotion strategy, the label offers a large range of free music podcasts, organised by genre. Almost every musical niche is accounted for – from punk to baroque to electronica – right down to the wilfully specialist (hammered dulcimer, lute, viola de gamba) but it’s hard to beat an hour of Bach.

NHS Couch to 5K Cynics might deride this NHS-sponsored podcast series – in which a friendly personal trainer guides listeners through a gentle two-week running course – as a hapless policy initiative you might find being promoted in The Thick of It; but it’s actually a genuinely helpful fitness aid. Each episode is designed to be listened to on headphones during the course of a run, and features music specially tailored to match the tempo of the exercise. A good treatment for post-Olympic fallout.

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Le Show It’s a sad truth that most “humour” podcasts are desperately unfunny, leaning heavily on tedious in-jokes and levels of profanity that would make even Bernard Manning blush. But, to paraphrase TS Eliot, there are a number of sapphires in the mud; and this weekly, hour-long syndicated broadcast by the actor and comedian Harry Shearer – best known as the voice of Mr Burns, Ned Flanders and a score of other Simpsons characters – is one of them. Mixing sketch comedy, music, Chris Morris-style satirical news commentary and occasional pieces of strikingly hard-hitting journalism, it’s an invigorating reminder that American talk radio isn’t solely populated by hawkish traditionalists.

INTERNET RADIO CHOICE

Monocle 24 In October 2011, Monocle, the high-end lifestyle magazine often seen poking from the bags of bright young things in First Class departure lounges, launched its own online radio station. It’s a slick, cosmopolitan and well-resourced operation, pitched somewhere between the BBC World Service and commercial business radio; with a daily schedule that includes documentaries, interviews, music and debate.